Analysis of Audio Streaming Capability of Zigbee Networks
Although formerly conceived for industrial sensing and control over Wireless Sensor Networks, LR-WPANs are registering an increasing interest in experimenting multimedia applications, with particular emphasis on evaluating the streaming capability of Zigb
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Dept. of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of Bologna, Italy {davide.brunelli,luca.benini}@unibo.it 2 Telecom Italia Lab, Italy {massimo.maggiorotti,fabioluigi.bellifemine}@telecomitalia.it
Abstract. Although formerly conceived for industrial sensing and control over Wireless Sensor Networks, LR-WPANs are registering an increasing interest in experimenting multimedia applications, with particular emphasis on evaluating the streaming capability of Zigbee networks. Due to their limited throughput they are not expected to provide high QoS, nevertheless there are several application scenarios such as distributed surveillance, emergency and rescue where audio and video streaming over low cost Zigbee networks is highly desirable. In this paper we first investigate the feasibility of Zigbee-like networks for low-rate voice streaming applications. We analyze important streaming metrics such as throughput, packet loss and jitter in multi-hop topologies. We propose some improvements in the stack implementation and show the performance in order to determine the streaming capacity limits of LR-WPAN networks.
1 Introduction and Contribution The past few years have seen an explosion of research studies on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and in particular on low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) conforming to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. WSNs have been confirmed as an important embedded computing platform and in the next future it is expected that LR-WPANs will be used in a wide variety of embedded applications, including home automation, industrial sensing and control and environmental monitoring. In this paper we focus on Zigbee [1], which is one of the most promising standards for LR-WPAN. It relies on IEEE 802.15.4 and it is specifically designed to address the need of low cost, low power solutions and flexible network routing and management. Although most of the past and the current applications for WSN focus on simple sensing and reporting activities , there is a growing demand to make WSNs really ubiquitous and in particular there is the need to support multimedia streaming for audio, voice and low-rate video. A wireless sensor network is a collection of low-cost sensor nodes that can be deployed very quickly in the environment and can communicate with each other via radio interface. To allow large networks some nodes act usually as routers for multi-hop connections without relying on any pre-existing infrastructure. For all these features together with low-power consumption, WSNs are very attractive for many applications such as conferences, intra-building communications as well as surveillance and emergency scenarios (e.g. law enforcement, rescue activities ...) and voice streaming communication is an attractive feature for many of these network scenarios. R. Verdone (Ed.): EWSN 2008, LNCS 4913, pp. 189–204, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
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Since so far much attention has been paid to low duty-cycle applications, to the best of our knowledge, stre
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